How the US government is monitoring Social Media: An empirical Twitter study

Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject Communications - Media and Politics, Politic Communications, grade: 1, University of Vienna (Institut fur Publizistik und Kommunikationswissenschaften), course: Digital Communications and Privacy, language: English, abstract: Today Social Media is everywhere. We use it at home at work and even while we’re on our way (mobile apps). The governments have been trying to get this new hype under control with the intention to use it for their own goals. Some of these efforts have found the public’s ap-proval others not so much. As social media monitoring is becoming more and more precise many people see it as a threat to their privacy. The goal of this research project is to analyze articles that deal with the monitoring of social media by the US government. For the analysis part of my study I chose to use Twitter as my data source. As a country I chose the US since its government is quite involved with social media and it provides plenty of content to analyze. In addition I will present some interesting findings from articles I collected from websites, blogs and newspapers. This should give the reader an idea about the topic and help to follow the empirical part of this paper. Throughout this paper I will try to stay as objective as possi-ble on this controversial topic. The main question of my empirical study will be: What is the overall tonality of tweets deal-ing with the topic The US government is monitoring social media . In order to be able to answer this question I have analyzed and described many Tweets with on online Archive to which I will talk more about on a later stage.